


Ultra Violet

by costumejail



Series: Hyper Thrust Pride Week [7]
Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys - My Chemical Romance (Album), The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Comic)
Genre: (Both pretty brief mentions), Adopted Children, Allusions to the events of SING, Found Family, Gen, Minor Character Death, Motorbabies, Nonbinary Jet Star (Danger Days), One Shot, Past Violence, and the major character death is also like just barely there
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-15
Updated: 2020-06-15
Packaged: 2021-03-04 03:02:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24726436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/costumejail/pseuds/costumejail
Summary: When a motorbaby wants a distraction from their world, they go to Ultra Violet and ask for a story.And one of her favourite stories to tell begins and ends in the walls of Battery City.
Relationships: Jet Star & Kobra Kid & Party Poison (Danger Days), Jet Star & Original Killjoy Character(s) (Danger Days)
Series: Hyper Thrust Pride Week [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1779970
Comments: 8
Kudos: 13





	Ultra Violet

**Author's Note:**

> Day seven of @Killjoynest's Hyper Thrust Pride Week (I don't know why ao3 isn't letting me add links to the beginning notes right now). The Prompt was just "Violet" but I had to go a little extra with the title for this one.
> 
> Warnings are as in the tags. Some mentions of violence/claps and minor character deaths. There's a one-line reference to first aid procedures. And there's a similarly short reference to the events of SING.

Some think that after living in the zones for long enough, people begin to blur together. They'll forget the exact details of killjoys in favour of seeing them as patterns. The ones that will never stop running, the ones that are tired and want to settle down, the ones that have hands meant for healing, and the ones that find joy in cracking skulls. But for Ultra Violet, she remembers each killjoy as their own person.

Every scar gained during a clap. Every tear she wipes from the eyes of a sandpup howling for someone they’ve lost and every laugh or breathless cheer of triumph. Every body she’s burned and every mask she’s put in the mailbox. They all live forever in her mind, names and faces and voices.

It’s part of why her convoy listens to her every word. She isn’t a leader per se, but her age, her experience, and her vast memory lend weight to her words among the motorbabies she calls family. They ask for her opinion on where the convoy should head next, what claps to get involved with and what raids to let pass by. But she’s also the first person that the children ask to sing them to sleep, the most popular fire at night is whichever one Ultra Violet sits at, and when a motorbaby wants a distraction from their world, they go to Ultra Violet and ask for a story.

And one of her favourite stories to tell begins and ends in the walls of Battery City.

It begins with a young couple and their five-year-old taking a BL/ind approved trip to Zone One and trying to disappear into the sands. They don’t know about the tracker installed in their bumper and so by the time they hit zone three there’s a whole squad of dracs on their tail and they have no weapons to make a stand with when their car runs out of gas. When Ultra Violet tells the story, she can still smell the ozone of the shootout that her convoy arrived too late to stop. She was younger then, somewhere in her mid-twenties and the only opinion of hers that the convoy listened to at that age was the one that said they needed to take the screaming child strapped in the backseat of the smoking car wreck. 

So it was Ultra Violet’s cruiser that Jet Star grew up on the back of. They were a quiet child, forced to grow up too fast in the desert and haunted by the memory of their parents' laser-riddled corpses. But little by little, aided by Ultra Violet’s unending patience, they grew out of their shell into a gentle killjoy with a penchant for pranking the ones they loved. In the warm glow of the firelight, Ultra Violet lights up whenever she recalls the mischief that Jet Star got away with, hiding harmless insects in the sleeping bags of their brothers and sisters, borrowing ray guns and returning them modified to play prewar punk songs when fired, or the day that they and Intra-Red dressed as each other, rode each other's cruisers, and even adopted each other's ways of speaking.

She can recall the pride she felt the first time Jet rode a cruiser by themself, or their steady voice the first time they confirmed that, yes, they/them pronouns were the best fit for them, or simply endless nights showing them different ways to add patches to their jacket. The jacket that had belonged to Ultra Violet’s father, bearing adornments stretching as far back as the earliest days of the Helium wars. it was passed to Jet when the Witch carried Violet’s father onward. While Ultra Violet never had children of her own, she loved Jet as if they were blood and that bond was respected by every member of their convoy. To mess with Jet Star was to mess with Ultra Violet, and to mess with Ultra Violet? Well, no one was really interested in finding out what would happen to them if they did.

Ultra Violet could tell anyone who would listen about her years spent roaming the zones with Jet Star. Looking back and to her right to see them gripping the handlebars of their black and silver bike, high boots and thick jacket and a bandana tied around their face to ward off the sand kicked up by the convoy as they soared across the desert. Catching a glimpse of them with their feet up on their handlebars during a rest stop, balanced on their bike as they napped under a makeshift canopy. Jet was well-adapted to life on the move, their cruiser was an extra limb to them, Ultra Violet tells her listeners. They took care of it and were never far from it, leaning back against it at a fire, soaking up the warmth and laughing as their fellow ‘joys exchanged stories and jokes under the endless desert sky. 

To hear Ultra Violet talk about them, one could almost feel the wind that had whipped through Jet’s curls, smell the woodsmoke on the collar of their jacket, hear their raucous laughter, or picture the callouses that decorated their careful hands. They could feel the same pain that Ultra Violet had felt when Jet stopped running with her convoy.

It was a no hard feelings type of thing, she always says. They picked up a pair of sunburnt city kids and Jet knew deep in their soul that their destiny was to join the siblings in whatever they did. That doesn’t mean it didn’t hurt. It’s unsaid that Ultra Violet considers Jet’s leaving the same as an amputation. An uprooting of the child she’d raised for three-quarters of their life at that point. It was years before Ultra Violet had healed enough to see Jet without feeling the phantom ache of the place they should have occupied at her side. They had, she will admit, made the right decision for themself and for the two that would come to be known as the Venom Siblings. Whatever plans the Phoenix Witch had for them couldn’t be fulfilled in the convoy and Ultra Violet can’t hold that against them.

She’s not too happy with the Witch about what those plans turned out to be, though.

The day that the news came over the static that the fiery crew known as the Fabulous Four had burned out in BL/ind headquarters was, bar none, the worst day of Ultra Violet’s life. To think of Jet Star, her child, so violently ghosted was a knife to her heart. Having a perfect memory means that Ultra Violet can’t forget the exact wording of the broadcast, the way Dr. Death-Defying’s voice shook as he delivered the traffic report, the feeling of her throat tearing as she screamed misery to the sky.

That’s where the story ends. Ultra Violet tells the story of Jet Star to anyone who asks and it hurts her to do so. The pain of her lost motorbaby hasn’t lessened with the years, it’s a hurt that she’ll never forget. But she can also never forget their laugh or the way they curled into her side as a child who had woke with a nightmare. And given the choice between picturing Jet bleeding out on the hood of their crew’s Trans Am and remembering them riding alongside her into the sunset, sunglasses protecting their eyes from the glare and a smile to rival the sun’s brightness? Well, that should be obvious.

**Author's Note:**

> This one felt so good to write. I've been wanting to establish my Jet backstory properly PLUS I was up last night thinking about motorbabies again PLUS I got the chance to use two killjoy names that have been bouncing around my brain for a while.  
> This is the last day for the Hyper Thrust Pride week so thanks to anyone that read all, or even just one, of the things I posted in the last week! I had a LOT of fun with the prompts and everyone was really nice leaving comments and kudos on my works!  
> If you wanna leave a comment or [send me an ask](sleevesareforlosers.tumblr.com/ask) then feel free! Thanks for reading!


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